Monday: Holding Their Spiritual Pulses?
WEEK 37
MONDAY
HOLDING THEIR SPIRITUAL PULSES?
John 7:37-39
We noted yesterday that it was love—redeeming love—at the heart of their experience of God that made the disciples outgoing instead of ingrown. An ingrown spiritual experience is as bad as an ingrown toenail. One sets up a physical festering and the other a spiritual festering. The validity of a spiritual experience is determined by its vitality. Does it have enough vitality to be redemptively contagious?
One of the most striking things about the experience of God in the Acts is the complete absence of any sign of the ingrown. This group did not sit around holding their spiritual pulses, analyzing themselves, and holding séances to see if God would appear by their techniques. God in the Holy Spirit was in them; they knew it. And God was not playing hide-and-seek with them; the Spirit came to abide with them forever. The only way they could get God out was to sin God out. With the fact of God fixed, they went out to witness. The Holy Spirit was given on the condition that they be witnesses: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses” (Acts 1:8). And the special work of the Holy Spirit is this: “he will bear witness to me; and you also are witnesses” (John 15:26-27 RSV). So the very nature of the experience of the Holy Spirit was a witnessing experience.
This meant that their inner experience was a base of operation; it was not the end. That was psychologically sound. It freed them from self-preoccupation and made them outgoing. Any religious experience is sick if at the end you are preoccupied with yourself. One of the supreme dangers of psychoanalysis is that it keeps the analyzed person preoccupied with self, sometimes a year or two years or more. That very self-preoccupation would create a neurosis if you didn’t begin with one. Analysis? Yes, but just enough to find the facts. And they can usually be found in a comparatively short time. Then on to the synthesis that comes through self-surrender to God. And then, on to the sharing of that experience of God with others. Then the person is psychologically sound in the self and creative with others. That person is on the Way!
O Lord, I thank you that your plan of redemption is sound for me and for others; it is sound. And when I work it out, the sense of soundness spreads through me. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Love lifted me, and love lifts me out of myself, free to serve.